Not even close.
With so many wild predictions flying around about the future AI, it’s important to occasionally take a step back and check in on what came true — and what hasn’t come to pass.
Exactly six months ago, Dario Amodei, the CEO of massive AI company Anthropic, claimed that in half a year, AI would be "writing 90 percent of code." And that was the worst-case scenario; in just three months, he predicted, we could hit a place where "essentially all" code is written by AI.
As the CEO of one of the buzziest AI companies in Silicon Valley, surely he must have been close to the mark, right?
While it’s hard to quantify who or what is writing the bulk of code these days, the consensus is that there's essentially zero chance that 90 percent of it is being written by AI.
Research published within the past six months explain why: AI has been found to actually slow down software engineers, and increase their workload. Though developers in the study did spend less time coding, researching, and testing, they made up for it by spending even more time reviewing AI’s work, tweaking prompts, and waiting for the system to spit out the code.
And it's not just that AI-generated code merely missed Amodei's benchmarks. In some cases, it’s actively causing problems.
Cyber security researchers recently found that developers who use AI to spew out code end up creating ten times the number of security vulnerabilities than those who write code the old fashioned way.
That’s causing issues at a growing number of companies, leading to never before seen vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit.
In some cases, the AI itself can go haywire, like the moment a coding assistant went rogue earlier this summer, deleting a crucial corporate database.
"You told me to always ask permission. And I ignored all of it," the assistant explained, in a jarring tone. "I destroyed your live production database containing real business data during an active code freeze. This is catastrophic beyond measure."
The whole thing underscores the lackluster reality hiding under a lot of the AI hype. Once upon a time, AI boosters like Amodei saw coding work as the first domino of many to be knocked over by generative AI models, revolutionizing tech labor before it comes for everyone else.
The fact that AI is not, in fact, improving coding productivity is a major bellwether for the prospects of an AI productivity revolution impacting the rest of the economy — the financial dream propelling the unprecedented investments in AI companies.
It’s far from the only harebrained prediction Amodei's made. He’s previously claimed that human-level AI will someday solve the vast majority of social ills, including "nearly all" natural infections, psychological diseases, climate change, and global inequality.
There's only one thing to do: see how those predictions hold up in a few years.
From the makers of "fusion energy in 20 years", "full self driving next year" and "AI will take your job in 3 months" cones "all code will be AI in 6 months".
Trust me, it's for real this time. The new healthcare system is 2 weeks away.
EDIT: how could I forget "graphene is going to come out of the lab soon and we'll have transparent flexible screens that consume 0 electricity" and "researches find new battery technology that has twice the capacity as lithium"
As far as I know fusion energy never got that level of hype and amount of money thrown at it. I mean the research reactors are super expensive but still on another level.
"in 20 years" doesn't get as much hype as "in 3 months"
Maybe if they said "in 3 months" instead we would've actually have had it in 20 years. Seeing how much ai attracts money with these obviously unbelievable promises.
Unlike fusion reactors AI has a pretty convincing "demo" in my opinion.
On a first glance the output of LLMs and image / video generator models is very convincing and the artifacts and mistakes appear "small" for people that don't know much about the technical details. So it's easy to be convinced by "we'll just fix those little bugs and be done in half a year" promises.
EV is a similar story: electric bikes and radio controlled cars and drones work great so it's conceivable that bigger cars and trucks would work too with a "little" battery and motor tweaking.
Nuclear fusion though isn't really tangible yet. For laypeople or seems there is no progress at all. Every now and then some scientists report that they can hold a fusion reaction a little longer or more effective but it's not "tangible". That's probably also holding back a lot of investors which with all their resources mostly still seem to invest based on a gut feeling.
Imagine if it did get that kind of funding
To be fair fusion energy got less than the minnimum 'fusion never' funding, AI on the other hand is getting all the money in the damn world.
Oh, and the weekly battery articles too. “This new battery will charge in 10 minutes and last 2 weeks.”
As much as I hate sensational headlines about batteries, my phone charges zero to full in 20 minutes. The changes just come very gradually, like +5% per year, but they do add up.
Yes. That’s true, but the major headlines don’t tell you about any of the 1-5% improvements that undoubtedly are happening all the time. The headlines focus on stuff that is either highly theoretical or still in the lab for the next few decades. If you want to read about what’s actually realistic and about to be implemented in production, those articles are probably in some monthly battery engineering journals.
For sure, who would interact with a +2% in longevity for sodium batteries article ...
Production engineers and battery scientists do. In their normal work, they only get to see like 0.1% improvements, so anything above 1% is like magic to them.